With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it is undeniable that love is in the air. As a small business that helps other small businesses grow online, we must confess that there are some online tools that we absolutely can’t live without. If you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you probably have seen these tools mentioned before. These are the online tools we love, and the online tools your small business should love too.

Google Analytics

As we mentioned previously, Google Analytics is a fantastic tool to help you measure not only the performance of your website, but also the goals that you have established for your website. Before using Google Analytics, it is important to keep in mind your business goals when generating the goals you want to accomplish with your website. Once these goals are set, the numbers from Google Analytics will help you see which areas of your website are performing well and which areas need improvement based on what you want to accomplish. We cannot live without Google Analytics because it allows us to understand if our websites are successful or not.

Hootsuite

Nowadays, it’s no longer enough to have a website. Today, you also need a web presence, which is why we love Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a scheduling platform that allows you to schedule your tweets and posts from Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. It additionally lets you manage other apps such as Instagram and YouTube. Hootsuite is our right-hand man when creating an online community with our target audience. It not only allows us to schedule our tweets and posts, but it also allows us to see our mentions, direct messages and feeds in nicely segmented feeds. Now that we’ve found Hootsuite, we will never let it go.

MailChimp

Being able to put a message together and send updates to our customers and our customers’ clients is important to us. With the easy-to-use templates from MailChimp, we are able to send newsletters to our target audiences in a clean and unified manner. And, apart from being able to put the newsletters together in a template, MailChimp offers a ton of cool features to complement the newsletter like automatic shares via tweets and Facebook posts and post-submission analytics. If your small business is thinking of sending newsletters to customers, MailChimp might be the solution you’ve been looking for.

Netvibes

A small business with a web presence should always have something valuable to talk about to establish expertise in its industry. But in this Internet era full of information, a small business with a web presence is not only talking – it is also being talked about by its customers. So, imagine a tool that can give you items to talk about from sources that you’ve handpicked for curation purposes, while giving you the ability to track what people are saying about your business online. It exists, and its name is Netvibes. If you’re a small business owner seeking to establish a better web presence, get to know Netvibes. You can personalize it by adding sources where you can curate from and the keywords you want to find information on for reputation management.

Wefollow

Because we’re big Twitter fans, we couldn’t leave this tool out. There are thousands of people on this social network, and as a small business, it may seem overwhelming trying to find the correct people to connect to. There’s no need to be overwhelemed. Wefollow is here to the rescue! This tool will help you find prominent people based on the keywords that you type. So, if your small business is trying to connect to manufacturers, you can simply search “manufacturing” as an interest and you’ll be able to see the most prominent people on Twitter talking about manufacturing. If you’re a small business struggling to find meaningful connections on Twitter, you’ll fall in love with Wefollow. It will help you connect with all the people you want to be connected to.

What other social or web tools do you love? Is there a tool that you can’t live without? Share them with us!

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Ana Perez-Olave

University of Florida graduate with a degree with Public Relations. I'm currently the Lead Digital Marketing Analyst at Kwikturn Media and I write articles with tips on growing business through social networking, web design and eCommerce.